The Complete Maus

Maus memorializes Spiegelman's father's experience of the Holocaust - it follows his story, frame by frame, from youth and marriage in pre-war Poland to imprisonment in Auschwitz. The `survivor's tale' that results is stark and unembellished. One of the clichés about the Holocaust is that you can't imagine it - like nuclear war, its horror outfaces the artistic imagination. Spielgelman disproves that theory... Spiegelman portrays the Nazis as cats, the Jews as mice, the Poles as pigs and the Americans as dogs. They are all terrifyingly human...